New Player Building East Coast Data Center for Trans-Atlantic Connectivity

A newly formed company called New Jersey Fiber Exchange is building an East Coast data center that will provide connectivity to submarine cable systems that link U.S. to Europe and South America.

The roughly 50,000 square foot two-story data center will provide colocation suites or cabinets to companies interested in connectivity options available there. Mumbai-based telecommunications giant Tata Communications will provide access to its submarine cables, but the data center will be carrier-neutral.

NJFX is entering a busy market. There is no shortage of options for reaching submarine cable systems or data center providers that offer them on the East Coast. There are numerous cable landing stations in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, as well as in Massachusetts and Florida, connecting to Europe, Middle East, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean.

Some of the ongoing new submarine cable construction projects include a U.S.-Brazil cable being built by Seaborn, which Microsoft recently invested in, and a Hibernia Networks project to build a trans-Atlantic system that connects North America and Ireland.

The company expects to bring the data center online in 2016.

“We are building a data center that will serve as a network interconnection point at the eastern most edge of the United States to enable companies to design and construct the most efficient network for their business and ensure the delivery of high-bandwidth applications to serve end-customers,” Gil Santaliz, founder and managing member of NJFX, said in a statement.